The digital environment has a significant impact on children. It poses strong challenges but also ample opportunities for the exercise of children’s rights. Its landscape is complex and rapidly evolving, and the discussions that are taking place today will shape children’s relationship to technology for decades to come.
In this series, we apply a children’s rights approach to the most significant debates affecting children in the digital environment.
25 MAY 2026
VPNs are rarely portrayed as a technology that children can legitimately use. Rather, they’re props in a familiar drama: nefarious actors, murky intentions, children who hide what they’re doing from their parents. For some, it’s a compelling story. It’s also, from a technical and children’s rights perspective, wrong.
21 MAY 2026
Countries are racing to ban social media for children, and while everyone has some idea of what “social media” is, there’s no accepted common definition in the debate on bans. Australia and the UK show just how difficult it is to build law on the quicksands of unclear definitions.
2 APRIL 2026
Are policies that deny children access to social media just "restrictions" or outright bans? And is letting children on social media more like sending them to Mars or to a nightclub? Language and metaphors have immense power in policymaking, and they’re not being used responsibly.
10 FEBRUARY 2026
Should governments ban social media for children? From a children's rights perspective, this is the wrong question. Instead, we should start by asking the right ones.
